The crown jewel in Apple/EMI’s extensive 2010 John Lennon remasters series, Signature Box contains all of the solo studio albums Lennon released during his lifetime (minus the trio of experimental duet LPs with Yoko Ono released on Apple and Zapple), his first posthumous album Milk and Honey, a disc of non-LP singles, a disc of home demos, but not the 2010 showcase item Double Fantasy Stripped Down, which is available only as a bonus on the indvidual reissue of Double Fantasy. It is, in other words, close enough to complete to perhaps invite a little bit of quibbling about what is absent -- Live Peace in Toronto could fit in nicely with this batch and there are outtakes from Menlove Ave missing but the real niggling comes with the home demo disc, which emphasizes demos and alternate takes of songs from Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, leaving behind demos of songs Lennon gave away, including “I’m the Greatest” and “Goodnight Vienna,” which he handed over to Ringo, and songs that never made it to one of his records. Ultimately, this is nitpicking because Signature Box is handsomely produced and contains the best-sounding Lennon remasters -- remastered by the team that did the acclaimed 2009 Beatles remasters, using the original mixes, not the recent remixes -- which is enough to make this more than worthwhile for the serious Lennon fan. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Rhino reissued expanded versions of all the Yes albums in the early days of the new millennium, so this 2013 set doesn't see either a massive sonic upgrade or expansion. Instead, those acclaimed remasters -- including the expansion of Big Generator, which hadn't seen U.S. release prior to this -- are now packaged in mini-LP cardboard sleeves and put into a box with new artwork designed by Roger Dean. Apart from the art, this may not offer hardcore Yes fans anything they don't already have -- that's assuming they didn't opt to purchase an import of Big Generator in the first place -- but this is an easy, attractive, and relatively affordable way to get the band's core catalog in one fell swoop. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Metallica were one of the most popular and influential metal bands of the 1980s and '90s; they were the first band from the speed metal underground to break through to mainstream acceptance, and as they became one of the most successful hard rock acts of all time, they continued to challenge themselves and their audiences with music that was thoughtful and innovative as well as brutally heavy. The Metallica Collection is a near-definitive overview of the group's recorded legacy, featuring in full the ten studio albums the group released between 1983 and 2008 -- Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, And Justice for All, Metallica (aka The Black Album), Load, Reload, Garage, Inc., St. Anger, and Death Magnetic -- as well as the orchestral live album S&M and two rare EPs, Some Kind of Monster and Live from Live Earth, for a total of 163 songs from one of rock's most powerful acts. ~ Mark Deming

It's often unfair to compare the Rolling Stones to the Beatles but in the case of the group's mono mixes, it's instructive. Until the 2009 release of the box set The Beatles in Mono, all of the Fab Four's mono mixes were out of print. That's not the case with the Rolling Stones. Most of their '60s albums -- released on Decca in the U.K., London in the U.S. -- found mono mixes sneaking onto either the finished sequencing or various singles compilations, so the 2016 box The Rolling Stones in Mono only contains 56 heretofore unavailable mono mixes among its 186 tracks. To complicate things further, the box -- which runs 15 discs in its CD version, 16 LPs in its vinyl incarnation -- sometimes contains both the British and American releases of a particular title (Out of Our Heads and Aftermath), while others are available in only one iteration (Between the Buttons is only present in the U.K. version). All this is for the sake of expedience: this is the easiest way to get all the mono mixes onto the box with a minimal amount of repetition. To that end, there's a bonus disc called Stray Cats -- with artwork that plays off the censored plain white cover art for the initial pressing of Beggars Banquet -- collecting the singles that never showed up on an official album, or at least any of the albums that made the box. Along with the odd decision to have the CD sleeves be slightly larger than a mini-LP replica (they're as big as a jewel box, so they're larger than a shrunk vinyl sleeve, a size that's rarely seen in other releases), this is the only quibble on what is otherwise an excellent set. The sound -- remastered again after the 2002 overhaul for hybrid SACDs -- is bold and colorful, with the earliest albums carrying a wallop and the latter records feeling like they're fighting to be heard in two separate channels and all the better for it. If nothing here provides a revelation -- none of the mixes are radically different, the way that some Beatles mono sides are -- this nevertheless is the best the Rolling Stones have sounded on disc (or on vinyl) and there's considerable care in this package, from the replications of the sleeves to the extensive notes from David Fricke. Plus, hearing the Stones in mono winds up being a hot wire back toward the '60s: this feels raw and vibrant, as alive as the band was in the '60s. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine